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The Integrity of Science

Last year, a paper authored by Woo Suk Hwang and published in the prestigious scientific journal, Science, turned out to contain fraudulent data. A similar incident occurred a few years ago when a Hendrik Schon published papers in both Science and Nature containing fabricated data. Many feel these incidents have given the scientific community a black eye and pointed out major flaws in how research is reported. However, I think it actually reinforced the integrity of science.

Although one may get away with falsifying data and results for a short time, eventually their fraud will be discovered. During the peer review process, reviewers are interested in assessing whether the data and results support the conclusions made in the paper, and whether such results are worthy of publication. They do this under the assumption that the data presented is honest and veracious. If the burden of investigating the honesty of the data were placed on the reviewers, the advance of science would slow significantly as reviewers are also active in conducting their own scientific research.

The prevalence of scientific fraud is too low to warrant such a burden on the reviewers. Thus, although a fraudulent paper may be published, when other scientists begin attempts to replicate the results or to build upon them, the fraud will be discovered. It does mean that resources of the later scientists have been squandered in the discovery of the fraud, but imagine the amount of time and money that would be required to verify data prior to publication of every paper. Thousands of papers are published every year in hundreds of journals, virtually all of them by honest scientists. The weak link in the current system seems to be that of the role of co-authors. It is the co-authors that need to take on a greater role in the verification of data, and thus holding them responsible for falsification of data is perhaps the solution to the problems in the current system.